PASADENA, Calif. — About 34 hours from the Mars rover Curiosity’s landing (scheduled for 01:31 am Eastern time on Monday), NASA brought us the latest weather forecast from the surface — dry and cold, with a slight chance of dust. Slight is good. Earlier this week, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spotted a dust storm south […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION] You don’t have to be at Monument Valley to see the Milky Way arch across the sky like this — but it helps. Only at Monument Valley USA would you see a picturesque foreground that includes these iconic rock peaks called buttes. Buttes are composed of hard rock left […]
We’ve previously posed here the idea that UFOs may be macro-quantum artifacts …. And there is a way to test that hypothesis. If UFOs are macro-particles of quantum, they’d be subject to quantum entanglement; that is, a UFO seen in one place would mimic a UFO in another place, in the same time frame. The […]
This much is undisputed: Late on the evening of July 19, 1952, air traffic controllers at Washington National Airport spotted a curious cluster of seven blips on their radar screens. Similar blips were sighted by radar operators at Andrews and Bolling Air Force bases. National’s control tower contacted commercial aircraft in the vicinity and asked […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE for high resolution. Credit: Cristian Fattinnanzi] Skygazers around planet Earth enjoyed the close encounter of planets and Moon in July 15’s predawn skies. And while many saw bright Jupiter next to the slender, waning crescent, Europeans also had the opportunity to watch the ruling gas giant pass behind the lunar disk, occulted […]
What created this unusual hole in Mars? The hole was discovered by chance on images of the dusty slopes of Mars’ Pavonis Mons volcano taken by the HiRISE instrument aboard the robotic Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter currently circling Mars. The hole appears to be an opening to an underground cavern, partly illuminated on the image. Analysis […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION VERSION] Few cosmic vistas excite the imagination like the Orion Nebula. Also known as M42, the nebula’s glowing gas surrounds hot young stars at the edge of an immense interstellar molecular cloud only 1,500 light-years away. The Orion Nebula offers one of the best opportunities to study how stars […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE TO ZOOM] Early morning dog walkers got a visual treat last week as bright stars and planets appeared to line up. Pictured above, easily visible from left to right, were the Pleiades open star cluster, Jupiter, Venus, and the “Follower” star Aldebaran, all seen before a starry background. The image was taken […]
[SEE HIGH RES IMAGE] A quintet of Saturn’s moons come together in the Cassini spacecraft’s field of view for this portrait. Janus (179 kilometers, or 111 miles across) is on the far left. Pandora (81 kilometers, or 50 miles across) orbits between the A ring and the thin F ring near the middle of the […]
How would you change the course of an Earth-threatening asteroid? One idea – a massive spacecraft that uses gravity as a towline – is illustrated in this dramatic artist’s view of a gravitational tractor in action. In the hypothetical scenario worked out in 2005 by Edward Lu and Stanley Love at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, […]
